“Author and broadcaster Maajid Nawaz joins GB News” cheered the hard right channel’s website this week, announcing the momentous news that the activist and former radio presenter had “expressed his delight at joining the Fearless Champion of Britain”.
“A prominent voice on free speech, Islamist extremism and political debate, Maajid brings extensive experience across broadcasting and journalism to GB News,” GBeebies boasted, adding that “his previous media work includes presenting a weekend show on LBC and appearing on Sky News’ The Pledge.”
And indeed it did – although there was no time to discuss the reasons behind Nawaz’s departure from cabbies’ favourite LBC in 2022 after five years, nor why they make him the perfect fit for his new employer.
Nawaz is a former member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir who renounced his Islamist past after a spell in an Egyptian prison and went on to form the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam.
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After standing for the Liberal Democrats in the 2015 general election, he went into broadcasting, joining LBC the following year. But a few years later his increasingly conspiracist views, particularly around Covid and the 2020 US presidential election became… a little problematic.
In January 2021, he signed an open letter to the FBI and other Western intelligence agencies asking them to investigate the possibility that Covid lockdowns were a “global fraud” promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party. Nawaz said that he believed “natural immunity” was safer, and in a deleted tweet from January 2022 linking to a news story about mandatory vaccinations in Italy, he captioned the story as “a global palace coup that suspends our rights… by a network of fascists who seek a New World Order”.
He also claimed on what was then Twitter that the 2020 US election in which Trump lost to Joe Biden was rigged and impacted by a lot of “very dodgy” events. He further claimed that the storming of the US Capitol was organised by anti-fascist groups and not Trump supporters.
One of his fellow LBC presenters, Iain Dale, shared his disagreement by saying: “In 11 years on LBC I have never publicly called out a fellow presenter. But I can’t stand by while this sort of irresponsible and dangerous propaganda is spread by someone who ought to know better.”
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Nawaz then tweeted: “I have had no choice but to become a CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR in #solidarity with the UNVACCINATED. I will NOT be getting any BOOSTERS” before the news broke that his career with LBC was ending. In response, he told his followers to subscribe to his newsletter, telling them the show was his family’s “only source of income”.
Now, following a stint working with right wing US social media site Gettr, he’s joining GB News, where he’s bound to feel at home. It is, of course, the channel which employs Neil Oliver (who insists Covid vaccines caused “turbo cancer”, a disease that is unrecognised by medical authorities) and once employed Dan Wootton (who is certain that the Covid lockdowns were a deliberate “psychological operation to instil fear and control the population”).
It continues to employ Bev Turner, the former basketball presenter who as recently as two months ago was pushing a claim that the World Health Organization had confirmed on its website that vaccination against Covid could trigger multiple sclerosis, despite the fact it had never said any such thing.
“No stranger to questioning dogma, I am delighted to join this fearless team that seeks to reimagine what it means to belong to Britain in our troubled but exciting contemporary times,” said Nawz on joining GB News. He’ll fit right in!
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